TooMeta.com

Amazon Web Service users, now including the New York Times

tbelote — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 05:16:15 +0000

The New York Times has rendered, stored, and made available
all public domain articles from 1851 to 1922. A bit more reputable sounding than blingee , but probably not any more mainstream

I’m also anxious to see the results of the Amazon Startup Challenge.

A 65 Mile Coastal Bike Ride

tbelote — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 03:27:28 +0000

Here is a google map of the route.

Bike ride from Palo Alto to the Pacific Ocean and back

tbelote — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 22:57:30 +0000

Last Sunday, July 8, 2007, I went on an amazing bike ride from Palo Alto, up Old La Honda, down Hwy 84 to Hwy 1 and then back up Tunitas Creek Rd returning to Palo Alto. In total, the ride was a little of 50 miles and took me about 8 hours since I’m in terrible shape. Now I’m dying to do it again.

Here is a google map of the route.

1408 is an awesome hallucinogenic horror movie

tbelote — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 07:08:46 +0000

1408 is a scary twisted mostly non-gory horror movie that is very refreshing compared to the other gorefests that have come out recently. I highly recommend it.

Clonezilla, Linux imaging with LVM support

tbelote — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 05:02:25 +0000

I’ve been having trouble finding or working out a system for easily imaging a linux box. Mondo doesn’t work because it seems to expect that it is run from the live system, I can’t seem to manage to chroot and run mondo and the same time off of a Knoppix DVD. Norton Ghost doesn’t support LVM. dd takes wayyy to long.

Thus far I have been imaging systems by dumping the ext3 file systems and recreating the partition layout, LVM setup, and install grub with a RedHat rescue cd. The problem is I think remastering a RedHat rescue cd with new files and a custom install script would take a long time, and installing grub from a Knoppix cd doesn’t seem to lead to a bootable system.

Clonezilla seems to be the perfect solution. It will image all kinds of systems, seems to work with LVM. And best of all it will make a CD or DVD for a fully automated restore of the system. I just imaged a system today. I will update the blog to reflect the results tomorrow.

–Update: Clonezilla works perfectly. The live restore CD is creates works, and imaging and restoring a few gigabytes of data only takes about 15 minutes.

Signing up for Google AdWords

tbelote — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 05:21:06 +0000

I recently signed up for Google AdWords. I felt a bit silly actually taking out an ad for basically my home page and blog, but I was also very curious as to how much historical ad information Google provides and just how many impressions and clicks it would lead too.

Thus far a few hundred impressions but no clicks. I’ve read that if you have a low click through rate that makes it more difficult to get impressions. This implies to me that there is some point where Google would just stop showing my ads even though I’m bidding because they don’t think anyone is interested.

Well, I’m anxious to learn more about AdWords and see how things go.

Untangle now open source

tbelote — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 08:29:13 +0000

Untangle recently open sourced their firewall, vpn, and content filtering solution. You can download it from source forge. Their product is definitely the easiest and most complete open source firewall solution. The installer assumes you will be using many of the features so the minimum system requirements are fairly high.

Comcast RBL spam list

tbelote — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 08:20:50 +0000

I recently started renting a server from cari.net, who I found from an ad in the Linux Journal. Thus far I have had great customer support from them, the bandwidth is high throughput and low latency, and the price is great. But the ip address is on Comcast’s black list. Unlike most other black lists that cool down after a few days and you get delisted, who knows what Comcast’s policy is. I have just sent a request to their delist request page, hopefully it goes well.

Synergy Rocks! Use multiple computers with one keyboard and mouse

tbelote — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 18:58:58 +0000

Syngery rocks! At my desk at work I have one linux computer that I do my software development on and a windows laptop that I use to check email and verify that the web app works in IE7. Now with two monitors I can switch back and forth between them with one mouse and keyboard just like they were one computer. Basically the program starts redirecting computer and mouse output to the other computer when the mouse hits the edge of the screen. It feels very natural like you are using one computer with two monitors. You can’t drag windows between the two computers (though I bet using something like VNC this could be coded up).

Java File Descriptor Leak

tbelote — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 05:12:45 +0000

I’ve encountered issues similar this bug:
http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=6246565
and have found some other bug entries in the past that seem to cover the same problem.

If I’m running a lot of Runtime.getRuntime().exec() or Axis SOAP calls java open several pipes associated with each exec or SOAP call, that especially under a heavily loaded system, can take a very long time to be garbage collected. This has lead to a case where this code hits the default 1024 open file limit in a case where only maybe 20 or 30 files should be open at a time. The solution thus far has been be more careful about opening sockets and pipes in Java, but I have yet to find a better solution. I’m still running Java 5 JDK 1.5 and many of the bug entries seem to recommend upgrading to Java 6.